Dear Friends,
Rejection. Is there anything worse? If you’re like me, you’re a person who takes risks, moves across the country, believes in herself, and does her best to suspend disbelief into the “universe,” or nothing, if you’re at all as cynical as I am. There are so many things in my life that are up in the air and instead of feeling liberated and curious, I feel scared and defeated. It’s not fun for me to not know what’s going on in my life, if it ever was. I don’t need to know everything but I need to know that this quest I’m on for the right literary agent won’t go as poorly as my quest for the right man is going. Everyone keeps telling me patience – I need more patience. All about patience. I’ve been patient. Months, weeks, and days go by where I wait for perfect strangers to enter my life or respond to my queries. When does it end? And then when someone does mildly connect to my work, they drop me some strange note that ultimately means nothing to me and can be vaguely associated to a few different parts of my work. “It’s not you, it’s me,” why don’t they just say? It’s true, you know. Most people don’t ever know why they don’t connect with someone or something the way that other person wants them to. So they default to vague because unlike dating, in the literary world it is considered rude if you don’t respond. What they really mean is: Well, if I can’t sell these five other memoirs I have more faith in on my desk right now, then I might want to hear back from you, but that could take months and years, depending on how much vacation time I take.
I am left with so many questions, but one main bottom line: When did people stop taking chances? After the year 1957, apparently.
I watched “An Affair To Remember” the other week, and it’s amazing to me how much patience these two characters had. Instead of “bitching” out and giving up (a common theme in modern society and specifically, in my generation), these people honor their promise that they made over the course of seven days of knowing each other, get single, and wait for each other. They wait for each other for respectable things, not just to get out of respective relationships. Both characters have pride complexes and need to prove to themselves that they are independent before they can be together. It’s really a beautiful message, but it seems that’s not the way the world works anymore. People aren’t operating out of integrity: they operate out of selfishness and don’t take risks. Why wait six months or a year for someone, or invest the time into someone or something, when there’s probably something else out there that takes less work? So people keep on fishing. Agents wait at their desk for the flood of emails to come in, whereas men just go for it and get out their fishing poles and bait the ends. I don’t care who wants to argue with me about it – selling a book is like dating, and if you’re me, that means it sucks. And the name of the game is the same: both my book and I are good. We are attractive, multi-demensional, refreshing and honest. If you call me pompous right now that just proves that you and I would not be a good match because I wrote the damn book, of course it’s awesome. But, both of us (me and my book) could use some work. We both need someone who wants to invest the time to edit us, and show us that we’ll all never be perfect, but we can invest time, effort and compromise for what is truly important in life. We’ll sell the book and I’ll live happily ever after. It’d be cool if a glass slipper was involved, and my future agent doubled as my husband. Thoughts?
Kisses from a June-gloomy,
Jessica
